You own one of the biggest and most important Continental hotels in the world, you are the king of a domain of hitmen and assassins, but even with all that power you still have to obey the High Table, you were serving them too long, you want more and you are tired of being under their control, they became arrogant and you are expendable in their eyes. It's time to take down those selfish kings and as fate would have it, you are in luck because the best hitman in the world just lost his wife, he is the Boogeyman, an unstoppable killing machine, so you use him to take down all your enemies. So let me put you in Winston's shoes and tell you why I think he fooled John Wick from the beginning, and how he started a war to take down the High Table and take over, in theory of course.

You might wonder why Winston would want to start a war against the High Table, if he seems like a nice guy. If you look at these movies from a certain point of view, you might notice some hints that he's actually playing his own game, plus there's something a bit diabolical about him, like when with one phone call he stops all the hitmen around him. Someone like this clearly likes power and control.

Good! So you are Winston, the owner of the Continental Hotel in New York. For most, a position of power like this is a dream job but not for you, you see yourself as a king, but of what kingdom? No matter how much you lie to yourself, you are nothing more than a pawn of the High Table and after 40 years of serving them you have had enough, you are tired of the rules and so much control as they oppress anyone below you. It's time for a change and to be king you must destroy all your enemies, you need to create chaos, escalate things to the point of war, but first you must bring out of retirement the deadliest hit man in the world.

And so it happens, fate is on your side because John Wick's wife is very sick dying of cancer, this is all very tragic but it is the perfect opportunity for you, if she dies John will be devastated, which means it will be easier to control and manipulate him, and John has a crucial role to play in your war. And yes, you may have had something to do with Helen's deteriorating health, of course you didn't make her get cancer, you're not that powerful but you may have pulled some strings to manipulate her medication and treatment, you have people all over town, most like you or beholden to you, so you used some of your influence to make sure Helen's condition deteriorated rapidly.

It's terrible but you are doing John a favor, she was going to die anyway. While Helen dies you kill a member of the High Table, the head of the camorra syndicate and Santino D´Antonio father. Why D´Antonio? Well, that´s because you know the father likes his daughter much better than his arrogant son, so she´ll inherit daddy´s seat at the table, you know Santino is an entitled brat, so he`ll try to kill his sister Gianna to get that seat at the table. And you know that John Wick owes Santino a blood oath, what a perfect coincidence that John's wife and Santino's father died at almost the same time.

But wait, for Santino to invoke the blood oath, John needs to be back in the game. So you use your contacts and control to create a situation where John Wick and Viggo's son, Iosef Tarasov meet. Before John retires I work for Viggo Tarasov, and can it really be a freak accident, that somehow the idiot who killed John's dog is also the son of his former employer? No, you winston orchestrated the whole thing. Viggo Tarasov is not only the head of a powerful Russian mob, but also an influential crime lord in New York, his death will not only benefit your ultimate goal, but will also eliminate the Tarasov syndicate from New York, giving you ultimate power over the city.

With Viggo out of the picture, John Wick is now back in the game, which means Santino D´Antonio will demand that John honor the blood oath and kill his sister, and since you know that both John and Santino are volatile, John will likely kill both D´Antonio brothers and take down the entire Camorra Syndicate in the process. The High Table loses power and now there is chaos in the underworld, your war is almost ready to begin, John broke the rules, he killed Santino D`Antonio in Continental territory which caused him to be excommunicated. You decide to help him, give him some time to escape as you know he is so angry at this point that he will not stop until he kills anyone who comes after him, and his enemies now are the High Table, which is exactly what you had planned.

You also know that Santino's death will bring a lot of attention and the High Table will investigate and because of their arrogance, they will insult powerful people like King Bowery and the Director, and using that, you escalate events to a boiling point creating friction between the factions. All this chaos makes the High Table vulnerable, sooner or later its members will have to come out of the shadows to regain control over their domain, and since the members of the High Table are now John Wick's targets, you know they are all going to die.

You succeeded in putting all the right pieces in place to get the perfect checkmate, after the confrontation with the Adjudicator, you sided with the High Table against John Wick, you had good reason to do that, you showed them that you are loyal but also that you are not someone they should mess with. It's all part of your plan, because now when the war starts, the High Table will see you as an ally and you will be in a better position to destroy them from the inside. Since Tarasov's mafia and the Camorra Syndicate have taken over, you are now the most powerful man in New York, and the High Table will need your influence, which gives you power over them as well, allowing you to play both sides and dictate all the outcomes of the war.

Hopefully all the key players will kill each other, but with all your games you could have made a colossal mistake, you betrayed John Wick, you tried to kill him, but you can still fix things by trying to convince him that you didn't really want to kill him and that you knew he would survive the attack, and thus fool the High Table into believing you were on their side. You fooled them, and you and John are still friends, hopefully it works out, but you know John Wick is not the type to forget. John might be your angel of death in this war, the key to taking down all your enemies, but sooner or later he will find out what you have done, how you manipulated him, that you killed his wife. Considering the fury of hell he unleashed for a puppy, he will probably burn the whole world to get to you. So, it's a good thing you planned for this too because now you have your own Boogeyman.

In chapter 3, John meets the old man who is the leader of the High Table. The old man runs everything from the shadows, hidden from the world, and a man like him must have his own super assassin, a warrior who is able to protect the leader of the High Mesa, and since John is likely to go after the old man, he will clash with the guardian of the High Mesa who might kill John for you. This super assassin male or female, should be someone who could challenge John on every level, not just be equal, but someone who might actually be more skilled and deadlier than John himself. Can you imagine if John Wick ends up clashing with someone like Tyler Wright, from Extraction in Chapter 4? A fight like that would not only be brutal, but it would really test John's skills. I actually think John should lose in his first fight against this other assassin, by losing in the first clash the audience will understand how dangerous and deadly this guardian really is, and in this way, the stakes will be much higher when the two have a rematch, it will make things feel much more intense and interesting, and who knows, maybe Winston was also manipulating this super assassin.

Maybe he is such a cunning genius that this guardian is secretly working for Winston, maybe Winston wanted the guardian to get as close as possible to the key players of the High Table as a deadly trojan horse, being so close to the most powerful people in the underworld could be a great source of information for Winston, as well as a good opportunity to better understand his enemy, to destroy them without them having any idea what is coming.

I think the John Wick franchise will really become iconic if we learn that Winston was behind it all, this will be the kind of twist that people will be talking about for years to come. Sure it's a little crazy, but it makes a lot of sense from a certain point of view. I wondered what Charon will do in all this Will he remain loyal to Winston or team up with John? I'm not sure I can handle seeing John kill Charon.

Do you think Winston is really an evil genius? Who should be the super killer in chapter 4? Let me know in the comments.